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December - 2014 - Special issue > si 50 Fastest Growing Companies

Kumi Labs: The Emerging Avatar in the Gaming Space

Anamika Sahu
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Anamika Sahu
John C. Maxwell, an author, speaker and pastor, once said, 'A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them'. Unfortunately, eight out of ten startup businesses fail. But the irony is; only a few fanatical entrepreneurs have the guts to bounce back in the game and make their mistakes the stepping stone to success. Kunal Mahajan, CEO & Founder, Kumi Labs, is one such entrepreneur who is engaged in growing his organization with the lessons learnt from his mistakes he made during his tot entrepreneurial days. "At times we were stuck with some decisions and at others, our lack of experience and mentorship lead us to taking wrong decisions. However, we were never dissuaded by our failures and mistakes but motivated, and today we stand strong," reminisces Kunal.


Way back in 2013, when Kunal noticed the emerging market and expanding opportunity in the mobile gaming space, he incepted his dream company Kumi Labs with a mission to offer wide range of mobile games and applications to a vast range of clients across verticals. The bootstrapped company kicked off its journey with just $3000 but with its out of the league applications built for mobile platforms and ultimate customer satisfaction, Kumi Labs showed a profit of $85,000 in just 18 months with more than 40 million downloads on various platforms like BlackBerry, Android, iOS and others till date. "Our success lies in finding the gap on the right time. We were bright enough to find them in the mobile market and thus developed galactic content and games to grab user's attention for longer period which several other applications and games fail to do," adds Kunal.

Though it is still a humungous challenge for companies to retain users as they easily get bored, Kunal and his team mitigate the confront by constantly being on their toes to create new concepts for various platforms and frequently updating them with enhanced features to keep the users engaged. "Each user needs new content or updates in frequent intervals at a high speed and our team which is inbound with high technology skills and aggressiveness towards new concepts, constantly delivers new applications and contents to keep the users engaged with our apps," explains Kunal. Because of its state-of-the-art applications and games, quick response to the market needs, new concepts, frequent updates, focus on entertainment, and selected target audience like age group and gender of each product, the company has emerged clear winners in several competitions. Some of them are being ranked in Hot 100 Technologies, ranked 1st in Vodafone AppStar Challenge in India and 2nd position in Vodafone AppStar globally, regional finalist for Microsoft Bizpark Startup Challenge, selected by Google in North Zone for their GREW, 2013 amongst several others.

Kunal concedes his achievements to Kumi Lab's small team of enthusiasts. He built this small team gradually with the stringent hiring process where only two candidates out of 300 are selected to match the agility and innovation of the company. "All our employees love to do challenging work and they are happy to be associated with us as we work on the latest cutting-edge and tough technology with quenches their thirst of excitement and job satisfaction. We follow a free-hand work policy where employees are bounded with limited set of rules giving them enough opportunity to innovate, fail and then emerge clear winners," Kunal adds.

One of the biggest challenges for the company currently is optimizing the revenue to generated higher returns. Kunal feels that due to the small size of the team, the product management is not very efficient and the company is not able to leverage the market in a larger possible way as well. To overcome these glitches, the company is on the constant lookout of people who can align their vision with that of Kumi Lab's. To further expand the operation of the company, Kumi Labs is looking forward for an investment of around $1 million to expand the team and the current limited infrastructure.

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